 |   Author : Deborah Digges Edition : 1 Number of Pages : 72 Publisher : Knopf List Price: Our Price: $12.45 You Save: $12.55 (51%) Used Price : $14.48 |
Product Description
This breathtaking collection of poems by Deborah Digges, published posthumously, brings us rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that returns to and expands the creative terrain we recognize as hers. Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.
The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.
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Customer reviews
moving book 
by .. reader (USA)
This is a lyrical, intelligent, and well-crafted book by an extremely accomplished poet. She takes an imaginative step beyond the work she has done in previous books. Anyone who is a fan of Digges will want to read her last volume of poetry. We all are all diminished by the loss of this writer.
Her Own Best Epitaph 
by .. Michael Salcman (Baltimore, MD USA)
There's no use dwelling on biography or the sudden death of Deborah Digges, one of the most accomplished and tender poets of her generation. One summer at Sarah Lawrence, well before she had published "Trapeze", her greatest book, I had the pleasure of doing a workshop with Deborah and, irradiated by her gifts, had to ask a common friend whether she wasn't the most brittle and delicate personality he had ever encountered. Her extreme sensitivity to the world is on full display in this last posthumous volume. With Jane Kenyon, who also died young, she shares the lyrical mantle of descent that Plath and Sexton left them. Although she was working on this book before her death, the editors at Knopf have made the final selection and order of the poems, the last two of which, "Two" and "Write A Book A Year", clearly point to the fatal denouement of her art, an art of passionate extremity. Despite their care and love, there is no guarantee that the book has turned out as she would have wished; on the very first page, the magnificent title poem is marred by a typo in which the first time the phrase "the rooms of my heart" appears it is turned into "my rooms of my heart". There are several poems in this collection that almost match the rhythmic clarity and power of "The Wind Blows Through The Doors of My Heart" but none can equal it. "The Birthing" is the best poem about the delivery of a farm animal since Ted Hughes. Digges takes her place among history's sirens in "The Dance of the Seven Veils". Her poems about her brother and her physician father are powerful with regret; the best is "A Man Like This", ending "and lay him the Ozarks sun on a half-sunken dock/ and rub his ripped and bleeding skin with ointment." The sparrows and small birds that dominated her previous work are replaced in this book (except on the cover) by flowers and the ominous shadows of a dead or dying husband or lover. One immediately thinks back to "Seersucker Suit", the great poem in "Trapeze", and understands that the wound never healed. In "the coat" she recalls "a man whose face was flying through his being, / jaundiced, hardly here, at once recognizable. / Forgive me I was happy in your coat to see you!" In several of the new poems, the entire house is whirling about her, like a demonic Disney cartoon; there's little enough of peace in life above ground. The poems of Deborah Digges are never so free that one can't hear the music in them, the mastery of sound and movement. A few of those included here could have ended one line before they do, could have otherwise been less emphatic. But I am quibbling on behalf of perfection, a state she knew was impossible to reach. It's a fine book and only misses the excellence of its predecessor by comparison with its greatness. No one who ever met her could ever forget her; if you get this book you will find out why. As she says at the end of "eating the dragon's heart", "Why do we offer you a dragon's heart and not a pomegranate?/ To ask, one has no right to call herself a poet."